Highlights

TONY FERRARILUXURY

Tell your friends, ya’ll: Tony Ferrari is back in business and “BUSINESS IS DOING WELL. HERE ARE SOME LEFTOVERS.” Leftovers from what, I wonder? Couldn’t be that MIAMI thing from a month ago. That tape was like 7 minutes skinny. There wouldn’t be any leftovers. It’s kind of the same stuff, though. All those no-fi synths drowning everything out, but the rap samples and that kind of DEEP bass compressed all the way into the shallow end of the pool. I tell ya, Miami 1986 and Miami 2013? Kinda the same thing.

Club Water Discus [EP]

Balam Acab’s Alec Koone is one lucky guy. First, he’s got the brain to produce liquid-smooth dance tracks for drinking copious amounts of codeine to. Second, he gets, like, all the ladies (that’s a given). And finally, he spent a month at the Water Discus underwater hotel in Dubai! This place hasn’t even been built yet! I have no idea how he got Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum’s invite (I didn’t.), but it’s clear Koone is a high-roller now, so he’s celebrating by releasing a free, five-song EP, clearly inspired by this fictional hotel.

This release shouldn’t be taken too seriously, though, especially by those who fell in love with Koone’s signature sound. Apparent from the bubbly samples — there are lots and lots of bubbles here — and the goofy song titles, Club Water Discus presents an about-face for someone who realized his moniker releasing melancholy slow jams on Tri Angle records. Koone states that it’s basically just a jaunt and “non-indicative of sound of future official releases.” After all, the dark, subterranean feel of Koone’s full-length Wander/Wonder was the standard bearer for the equally water-obsessed label, but the screwed vocal samples are presented in a way that makes me think more of Sea World than of Challenger Deep. It’s peppy and infectious, in a tongue-in-cheek way. Every drum hit lands with a splash.

The Sound [EP]

Jay Daifunka has 3D-rendered your entire internet history to the sounds of Nobel’s glorious “FACEBOOKHOUSE” (his word). You are just a floating lump of pixels, split into ever tinier quantified digital code, smaller than past Imperial or Metric systems could muster, let alone those cumbersome atoms. The promo bumpf might say that “IN THE FUTURE OUR CONSCIOUSNESS WILL BE UPLOADED TO THE INTERNET AND WE ARE GOING TO LIVE FOREVER,” but it knows that this has already happened. We are already being accosted by the conflicting immortal selves we’ve created for different functions, at different times. My drunken, late-night Twitter self is dancing and intoning like a baby while my pseudo-philosophical academic self is tutting at my Facebook self’s bad grammar. Yours are already in the distance.

The Last Hit (Soundtrack)

Have you ever listened to The Glow Pt. 2 and thought “oh man, I wish I could just isolate these droned out organ sections, add a little guitar, and listen to the result on repeat?” And then did you think to yourself, “Hey! That sure would be great paired with some footage of failed hit-men walking around in the woods!” Well, do I have the record/film for you!

Phil Elverum recorded just such a soundtrack to the film The Last Hit in 2005 and despite referencing Neil Young’s score to the Johnny Depp vehicle Dead Man as an influence, it’s very distinctly Elverum. According to his mysterious notes about the soundtrack, the film was made by some dude named Chris from Ontario and no copy of the work in its entirety was ever obtained. Even though we can’t hear/see Elverum’s music with its intended visual accompaniment, the score works pretty damn well on its own. Plenty of beautiful doom-laden textures abound and hint at the black metal via Angelo Badalamenti world that Elverum would create on future Mount Eerie releases.

∜♡MDISCS 2K13

Founded in 2010, ∜♡MDISCS: Futures Reserve Label (a.k.a. AMDISCS) has slowly become an understated force in today’s experimental underground, releasing music from an eclectic bunch of artists (C V L T S, Afrika Pseudobruitismus, DJ Baglady, VΞRACOM) and within a wide range of styles (DIY dance, glo-fi pop, vaporwave, future beats, bathdub, etc.). And in ∜♡MDISCS’s world, nothing is left unaestheticized: Their playfully aggressive viral approach to promotion is itself a work of art, which, when paired with the label’s associated blog All Everyone, United and its uncompromising artwork, makes clear how ∜♡MDISCS is on an altogether different plane, one in which past, present, and future are conflated into a multi-dimensional breeding ground/grid for young artists organically and collectively forging a Now aesthetic.

For this year’s free annual compilation, ∜♡MDISCS 2K13, the label has upgraded from a 52-track beast to a 73-track monster divided into two parts. We’re talking 4.4 hours of exquisite beats, smeared samples, breathy atmospherics, skittering electronics, demented hip-hop, synth blasts, and a whole host of other digital weirdness from the likes of coolmemoryz, Infinity Frequencies, a i r s p o r t s, ROMCOM, Feral Love (Burial Hex), CVLTS, AyGeeTee, Luxury Elite, ACTRESS PETS, Black Jeans, Police Academy 6, and many, many more. This is the sound of a post-medium, trans-geographical emergence, a pseudo-global hologram gutted and reconstituted with vibrations of the highest order. Or, as ∜♡MDISCS once put it: “Lo-fi gardening with hi-fi instruments and a dash of masochism.”

Spend your next 4.4 hours listening to both parts of ∜♡MDISCS 2K13 below.